


Shatter Me

by Catwithabook



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Blindness, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-22
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-01-26 01:43:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1670081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catwithabook/pseuds/Catwithabook
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s the silence, Riku decides, that is the worst part.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Silence

Chapter 1: Silence  
It’s the silence, Riku decides, that is the worst part. It lingers in the air and settles on his skin like so much dust. It seems, almost paradoxically, to muffle the faint noises that try to break it. The soft whoosh of air in tubes and the soft beep of the machine monitoring his vitals seem to sink away under the sheer weight of the quiet.

  
He’s not familiar with quarantine protocol, but he supposes that opening a window would defeat the purpose of trying to contain the germs.

  
The silence emphasizes how little time matters. The seconds drip away under the cover of the hush. He is woken at regular intervals, always the same routine of blood pressure and pulse and temperature. He would curse and shout to break it, the routine or the silence he doesn’t know, but in the end it’s too much trouble.

  
He almost doesn’t notice when it does break.

  
It’s the birdsong that breaks it, early one morning; the clear, sweet, brilliant notes forming a cascade just to his left. It seems unreal after the dead silence.

  
“There.” A nurse, he’s heard her voice before, says. “Fresh air, that has to feel good after all this.” She babbles on but he cannot remember what she says. The warble repeats itself outside just as the needle breaks the skin.

  
Since the darkness and silence had descended, sensation had ramped up its game, he decides. Because, he swears he can feel each individual drop of blood leaving his veins as the nurse finishes the standard draw. So he focuses on the birdsong. He wishes he could remember what kind it is, if only so he could have a picture to match with the sound. But remembering what species of bird frequent their little island was always Kairi’s specialty; just like it was Sora who could hold whole conversations with the little thrush who would perch outside their elementary school classroom.

  
The nurse finishes with the blood draw and starts to bustle around the room. His voice cracks slightly as he finally asks the question that he’s been hoarding close to his chest since he was raced to the hospital two weeks ago.

  
“H-how long until we know if it’s permanent?” He hates the trail off, the lingering hope that permeates the question. It sounds like a little kid. He can feel her sympathetic look and swallows hard. Maybe he’ll see the sun set again, the lap of the waves, the swish of a pink skirt, and the way that the breeze makes spikes out of brown hair.

  
The pause as he waits for her answer drags on for far longer than he thinks it should.  
“I’m sorry,” she finally answers. “But as far as we can tell, it is permanent.”

  
He swallows again and waits for the door to click shut.

  
Not much changes after the silence breaks. He has birdsongs to keep him company and the window admits breeze that smells of sea salt and sun that dulls the sharp scent of antiseptic. His parents are allowed in and his mom cries and hugs him.

  
He can’t help but feel as though there is a wall slowly rising between them.

  
He wakes the next morning to a trill, different this time. Sweet, but softer, like the bird is scared of being heard. It also comes from somewhere to his right. A few moments later the trill repeats from its usual left direction. The end of his bed shifts and the call is repeated quietly.

  
“Sora?” He feels the jump through the bed springs.

  
“Riku!” Sora’s voice, Riku decides, is infinitely preferable to birdsong and silence. He also decides that blindness comes as a distinct disadvantage to the best friend of a boy prone to tackle-hugs.

  
The warmth is… surprising. He’s hugged his friend before, slung arms over his shoulders and piggy backed him home after long days of chasing one or another of the other kids around the island. He doesn’t remember him being this warm though.

  
His arms had come up automatically to curve around Sora’s shoulders and he can’t seem to let go. Sora doesn’t seem to care.

  
It’s been weeks since Riku has been touched for more than the fraction of a second that it took to slip a needle in a vein or to double check the fit of a blood pressure cuff. He’d hugged his parents earlier that day, but they’d seemed to pull back every time they wrapped their arms around him. As though he was fragile and would break if they dared to hold on.

  
Sora clings, his nose presses into the crook of his neck, and his fingers bury themselves in the thin cloth of Riku’s hospital gown. When he does pull back Riku can feel the gentle rise and fall of his breath against his chest. Then there is a fist in his shoulder.

  
“Don’t ever do that again.” He’s surprised that Sora doesn’t yell it. He remembers when Kairi broke her arm and Sora shouted at her that she wasn’t supposed to hurt herself. She’d complained about broken ear drums for a week.

  
“It’s not like I said, ‘oh hey, you know what would be fun? Getting so sick that I end up blind.’” Riku doesn’t even try to keep the bitterness out of his voice. He can feel the pain in his throat trying to choke him.

  
It’s one thing to know something is a fact. It’s quite another to admit that fact out loud to your best friend.

  
The touch comes as another warm, jerking shock. Sora’s hand traces, slowly, along the edge of the bandages that crisscross over his eyes. His fingertips feel smooth against Riku’s skin, a delicate distraction from the continuous nagging itch of the bandages.  
“I know,” Sora pauses as though he’s trying desperately to think of what to say, then he swallows loudly and mutters. “It’s just not fair.”

  
It’s on the third day after the silence breaks that Riku realizes exactly how much work this is going to take. He is sitting in bed listening to the doctor talk about rehabilitation, about the things that he used to take for granted that will now be a daily struggle. About beginning to live in the darkness.

  
Though of course the woman doesn’t phrase it that way.

  
Sora arrives as soon as visiting hours start.

  
“Riku!”

  
The sheer amount of joy in his name makes Riku’s heart constrict in an odd double beat. Sora starts talking before the door is closed, babbling about school and Kairi, who will be joining them soon, and how Tidus is an idiot over some new girl and the fact that there’s supposed to be thunder storms tonight. His voice is alive with the stories that he tells.  
Riku tries to fight off the smile that is trying desperately to spread across his face. Somehow the darkness seems a little less all-encompassing when he has Sora’s grin to imagine.

  
The next morning after nurse Sayoko has checked his vitals and made small talk for a few minutes Riku gets up.

  
It feels like it deserves to be more dramatic than it is; in reality he simply pushes back the blankets, swings his legs to the left of the bed, and stands on the cool linoleum floor. The breeze from the window tickles his exposed skin. He slowly takes a step forward, and then another.

  
Three. He counts each pace carefully until he can touch the edge of the window frame. Three steps from the bed to the window.

  
The map of the room that Riku forms feels more like a schematic than an image. The three steps to the window from the bed, the three steps between the edges of the window and each wall; the door: three steps from the bed.

  
It’s all very flat and gray in his head as he has no details to fill it with. He has no idea the color of the walls, the print of the curtains, what the view from the window shows. He has no idea where he is in the world.

  
He sighs, squares his shoulders. There’s nothing that he can do about that now.  
The shower is the next major task that he embarks on. The bathroom is small, compact and slightly easier to maneuver in. He can almost always keep a hand on a solid surface to ground himself.

  
He maps a path from the faucet to shampoo to soap. The warm water feels luxurious on his shoulders.

  
It’s odd feeling his hands go through the familiar motions of washing his hair without even the banal and boring visual input of the tiles in front of his face to focus on. Instead he finds himself thinking about the beach, and Sora in swim trunks chasing Pluto-the-neighbors-dog into the water to retrieve his stolen practice sword.  
It’s a memory from another life almost.

  
By the time he finishes cleaning up the slight sense of vertigo that has been dogging his steps since he stood up this morning has begun to dissipate. He wonders how long it will take him not to notice anymore.

  
Sora arrives like clockwork at 8am, the start of visiting hours. He announces his presence by bouncing, Riku can hear the squeak of his sneakers on the linoleum, through the door with a half sung, half cheered ‘Riku!’ He keeps up the constant stream of chatter from that point on.

  
Riku welcomes it.

  
He begins to think after almost an hour of constant quiet babble that Sora’s voice can brighten up a room more than the whole visible spectrum of light.

  
As the days passes he begins to think of voices as colors.At first it’s not even conscious, just a sudden flicker of pink for a particularly bubbly nurse, or a streak of dark mahogany for his father.

  
Its Sora’s color that he first recognizes consciously. Sora is bright and golden and somewhat like the sun.

  
After that he starts paying attention. Kairi when she visit’s is a bright gleaming blue like their favorite swimming cove. His mother is a deep mossy green. Nurse Sayoko is a clear, crisp, gray. The night nurse whose name he can never remember is a glossy copper.

  
He wonders for a while if it’s normal, if his brain which is so used to visual stimuli it’s just trying to give the unused centers of his brain something to work with. In the end he decides that he really doesn’t care. It’s nice having something else to differentiate people by in his head.

  
By the end of the week Riku can move from bed to shower to chair and back with confidence.

  
One of the nurses notices that he’s constantly up now, pacing around his room avoiding the obstacles of bed and chairs by memory. She talks to the doctors and he is granted permission to wander. It comes with restrictions and conditions but Riku doesn’t care. The room feels far too much like a cage.

  
He forces himself to start small, even though his first instinct is to take off running as fast and as far in one direction as he can. He carefully charts his path down the hall way outside his room. His fingers learn the texture of the wall, the height of the plaques outside the rooms, and the sequence of raised bumps that indicate his own room.

  
Sora finds him making his way back to his room on his last day in the hospital.

  
“Riku!” the cheery greeting is flung down the hallway at him. He turns in what he hopes is the right direction. He guesses it is when a hand inserts itself into his own.

  
“Bored with being cooped up inside all day?” Sora says as he starts dragging Riku down the hall. “Come on lets go outside. It’s so pretty today, you would not believe the sky…” Riku lets himself be dragged, grinning as Sora babbles on about the weather.

  
He’s not sure what the sky looks like but it sure feels nice against his skin.


	2. Dawn

Home is supposed to feel like a sanctuary Riku thinks, familiar and safe and somewhere to run when you are injured and need to recover. It should not be a place that is fraught with danger and frustration. But the sharp reality of how lost he is hits home when he trips over the threshold, arms flailing, and nearly knocks that old coat tree behind the door over.  
His parents hover. He hadn’t noticed too much at the hospital for some reason, but here, in the strange familiar environment of his house, the fact that they are catering to his every whim becomes so very obvious that it draws his nerves tight.

  
In the end he escapes to his room and pretends to sleep; he’s too keyed up to really drift off but he needs to escape for a little while. Once the house falls still and silent he carefully gets up and begins to reacquaint himself with his home.

  
His room comes first.

  
He works his way around memorizing the location of the walls, the bed, the door, the window. He counts steps and trails his fingers over formerly familiar surfaces.

  
As the schematic begins to take shape in his brain he can’t help but superimpose the last image he has of the space over the top of it: the battered posters, the few (precious) drawings that Kairi had seen fit to gift him, the mess of pens, and school work and comics on his desk. The messy blue comforter and the glowy orange star light that Sora had given him for his last birthday.

  
It’s odd to think that he won’t see any of it again. He swallows. Forces himself to think about steps and nothing else. Once his room is more or less familiar he carefully opens his door.

  
The hallway is relatively easy, 15 steps long and 4 wide. The bathroom is once again a place where he can ground himself to a wall at all times.

  
“Riku?” His mother’s voice is sleepy and directly behind him.

  
He nearly jumps out of his skin.

  
Once he’s managed to assure his mother that he’s not hurt and return his breathing to normal he takes stock of the situation and asks, “What’re you doing up?” She is quiet for a moment.

  
“I thought that I heard you moving around and I came to see if you needed anything.”

  
Riku sighs.

  
“No mom, I’m fine.”

  
He lets her lead him back to bed.

By the end of the first week Riku is going to go insane.

  
The heat envelops the town and leaves everyone too hot to do much more than laze around in as little clothing as possible. It does nothing to soothe the raw edges of Riku’s nerves.

  
“It’s too hot to be inside Mom, Sora and Kairi invited me to the beach. I’m not wandering off alone or something. Plus how am I going to get any better with the whole walking around with no sight thing if I don’t practice?” He can feel the tension rising as he tries to direct his eyes to where her face is.

  
“Sweetie…” She trails off and he can hear the standard objections that he’s been hearing for the past week. Too soon. Too fast. Too much. Be careful. Don’t want to lose you.  
And his anger just slips.

  
“No, Mom. Just no. I’m not an invalid. I can take care of myself!” He spins on his heel, his fingers scrape across the wall and he bangs out the front door.

  
And into something warm and solid.

  
“Whoa!” There are hands on his shoulders and a warm golden voice just below his left ear.  
“What’s up, Riku?” Sora’s voice has a layer of cheery worry that slips into it when he’s concerned. Riku’s not sure how someone goes about being cheerfully worried, but Sora manages it somehow. Riku can’t stop himself from slumping forward, he shakes his head slightly not really sure what to say.

  
Sora seems to take stock for a moment and then he takes Riku’s arm, linking it through his.

  
“Right! Beach time!” He yells, and then all but drags Riku out of the yard. When they reach the pavement he settles Riku against his side and tells him when there are curbs, and uneven ground and other dangers that might just send him sprawling. It’s only a matter of minutes before Riku can hear the waves.

  
“So what was that all about?” Sora’s hands turn him gently, and he can tell by the placement of body heat and Sora’s hands on his biceps that he is facing his friend.

  
“I…” Anger and frustration and sadness and fear bottle neck in his throat for a moment before it all comes spilling out.

  
“I’m blind Sora. Everybody treats me as if I can’t do the things that I used to, and the thing is that they’re right most of the time. I can’t run and not be sure that I won’t fall over. I can’t tell when I’m going to walk over a cliff and sometimes I don’t want to. My parents are so scared that they’ll lose me because, let’s be honest, it’s a miracle that I didn’t die. They don’t want to let me out of their sight!” Riku swallows, trying to easing the tightness he can feel welling in his throat as his emotions rage. “All I want right now is to be free.”

  
Sora is silent for a moment; it drags and drags and Riku can’t stand not knowing what his face is doing. He finds Sora’s hands on his arms and drags his fingertips up over smooth warm skin to the cloth of his shirt to skin again on his neck, warmer still than his forearms, and then his jaw.

  
He remembers Sora’s face. He’s tried to imprint it on his mind’s eye since the day that he realized that he would never see it again. But now he begins to learn it: the sharp point of the chin, the delicate down turn of the mouth, the snub of the nose and the arch of a cheek bone. The crease between his eyebrows.

  
Sora’s hands are suddenly covering his pressing them to his cheeks.

  
“What do you need, Riku? Please,”-- and it is the plea that breaks the secondary dam, the first warm tickle of a tear traces down his cheek and he’s not sure when he will be able to stop.

  
Sora doesn’t hesitate this time. He wraps his arms around Riku’s waist, tugs him against his chest and holds on like he will never let go. He is so marvelously solid that Riku can’t think of a reason that he’d want him to.

  
He bends forward and buries his face in the crook of Sora’s neck and just lets the storm pass.

  
“Awwwww, when did you two realize that you were meant for each other then?” Kairi’s voice is laughing, but there is an undercurrent of worry just beneath the surface. Riku starts up right and turns just slightly to the right in the direction her voice had come from.

  
“Jeeze, Kai,” Riku can practically hear Sora ruefully rubbing the back of his neck.

  
“Come on, it’s too hot to just stand around. Let’s get you in the water.” Her hand slips gently into Riku’s. Her palm is warm and chapped and Riku smiles just slightly. He really does have good friends he thinks.

  
It’s later when he can feel the sun on his face and he’s sitting in the sand that Sora approaches him.

  
“So…” Riku feels him flop down in the sand next to him, close enough that Sora’s shoulder brushes his hip. “Earlier…” Sora trailed off again briefly. “When you touched my face, did that help somehow?” He sounds equal parts curious and confused.

  
“Yeah.” Riku wraps his arms around his knees and rests his chin on top. “I can feel your expressions sort of. And that helps me not to feel so…alone.” There is another pause and then Sora’s hand wraps around his gently and rests it against his own cheek.

  
Riku can feel the corner of Sora’s mouth curving upwards.

  
“Then feel free whenever you need to.” There is a bubble of feeling just behind Riku’s ribs. Small and golden and warm and he doesn’t quite know what to do about it. After the last few weeks he’s so used to living with a bubble that is equal parts rage and fear and sadness that this new light seems almost out of place.

  
There is a faint click off to his right.

  
“Kairi!” Riku’s hand slips away from Sora’s cheek as the other boy launches himself at their friend. Kairi’s giggle floats back on the breeze. Riku sighs. Apparently some things never change.

  
Sora walks him home, arm linked through his talking about how he will find some way to steal Kairi’s phone tomorrow and get rid of the photo that she had apparently snapped.  
“Riku!” The mossy green of his mother’s voice carries surprisingly well through the slow heat of the evening air.

  
“Hi, Riku’s Mom!” Riku can’t quite keep the smile off his face. Sora has called his mom that for so many years that no one really notices anymore. It still makes him smile though, to remember the tiny brown haired ball of energy that his best friend had been at five, too intent on figuring out the world to slow down for things like manners.

  
He can hear the smile in her voice too as she replies, “Hello, Sora.”

  
“Listen.” Sora says. Riku is desperately worried about what is going to come out of Sora’s mouth.

  
“Riku is safe with Kairi and me. We won’t let him get hurt. I promise. So you gotta let him come hang out with us. ‘Cause I think being home all the time is driving him crazy. We are high schoolers, after all.” Riku can tell his mom is staring at the two of them. He tries to stare at Sora too, but he’s unsure of quite which direction the other boy is facing.

  
“I…” His mom sounds like she wants to argue, but then she sighs. “I know that, Sora. Just please be careful? I know what sort of trouble the two of you can get up to.” And he hears a slight smile slide into her voice, probably remembering all the times that she had to come bail them out of some crazy scheme or prank. “I suppose all I ask is that you let me know where you are going, alright? Now, dinner’s in an hour. Sora, are you staying?”

  
Sora cheers a yes and then drags Riku inside and upstairs. It feels almost like old times.

  
“Alright,” Sora says, and Riku can picture him, hands on his hips surveying the room as though think of the best way to make it do what he wants. “Let’s get started.”

  
“Ummmm… get started on what?” Riku has always been a little wary when it comes to Sora’s projects. The scope of them sometimes baffles him.

  
“Cleaning your room silly.” Riku wonders sometimes about Sora’s ability to be excited about just about anything.

  
They start with his closet organizing clothes by type and then color. Sora cheerfully informs him that he’ll let him know if he ever wears anything that doesn’t match. Riku rolls his eyes and tells him that, yes, of course he trusts Sora’s fashion sense.

  
The book shelf is next. Sora forces him to sort through the books and pick out his favorites, even though Riku now lacks the ability to read them ever again. Sora says to do it anyway. Riku wonders what he’s plotting.

  
By the time they’re called for dinner the room is probably neater than Riku ever saw it. He also feels like he will be able to find anything that he could possibly need. Dinner itself is as exciting as it ever is with Sora over. His parents ask about how his summer break and Riku feels a pang as Sora relates the recent goings on of the island around bites of food and grins.

  
After dinner they sit out on the back deck. The heat has lifted a little, he can no longer feel sweat running down his spine just sitting still. It’s quiet except for the chorus of the night bugs. He inhales the scent of summer for a moment.

  
“You know you don’t have to do this.” He doesn’t turn to face Sora as he says it. Somehow it seems wrong to look even though he cannot see. The moon should probably be rising, though he doesn’t know what phase it’s in now, it could be full and bright, or the barest fingernail.

  
There’s a thump against his shoulder and the tickle of overexcited brown hair against his neck.

  
“Duh,” says Sora from just below his left ear. His voice is quiet and yet somehow seems even more golden than usual. “You really are a dummy sometimes.”

  
Riku snorts and shoves against Sora’s shoulder with his own. “I know I am, but what’re you?” He says thinking that, jeez they sound like middle schoolers. Sora’s laugh is brilliant. How the shove fight really gets started he doesn’t know. How it ends is with him sprawled on his back on the cool of the grass Sora leaning over him, laughing.

  
And then the world stops. Because somehow, he knows that this is a tipping point. Tipping to what he doesn’t yet know, but damned if he’s not going to find out.

  
His whole body feels very heavy as though it could sink slowly through the ground and into the earth. He inhales feeling his chest brush Sora’s before he lifts a hand and finds the curve of Sora’s jaw, two fingers finding the edge of his mouth. It’s tilted up, a smile that he cannot see.

  
“Wha-“ The word is only half formed on Riku’s lips when Sora suddenly leans forward and presses his lips to Riku’s. Riku’s first thought is that it is so like Sora to go stealing someone’s first kiss without a second thought. His second is that Sora’s lips are warm, and still and a little chapped against his. His third is, stars, he’s kissing his best friend on his back on the grass of his back garden. His fourth is he never wants to stop.

  
The hand that was reading the edge of Sora’s lips slides to bury it’s self in Sora’s hair. The other arm curves around him, resting in the warmth of the small of Sora’s back.  
The kiss doesn’t last more than 30 seconds.

  
When it breaks Riku can feel the fear beginning to swell somewhere in his chest, pressing against the golden glow that had been seeping into his core. Sora had had a crush on Kairi since they were barely in middle school he knows. He knows that relationships can be so tenuous. He knows that he needs his friend. Can’t lose the one sane thing in his life since everything was tossed in the air by a couple of nasty bacteria.

  
The feeling of Sora gently twining their fingers together brings him back to the reality of the rapidly cooling summer night. Sora gently draws their joined fingers to his own face and rests them against his temple.

  
“Hey, you’re thinking so hard I can hear it all the way out here. What’s up?” The question is deceptively light hearted Riku realizes as he feels the nervous twitch of Sora’s forehead. Riku shifts his hand so that he can tuck his thumb into the corner of Sora’s mouth, feel the tension that says that it’s drawn tight with worry. Riku supposes that makes two of them.

  
“I guess I just don’t want to lose you,” he says after a minutes thought. The words do not convey even a fraction of what that means.

  
Sora sighs. “You won’t. Or at least not if I can help it.”

  
Sora’s determination is second to none Riku knows, having been on the wrong end of it far too many times to count.

  
“Plus, Kairi’s going to kill me if I mess anything up.” Sora’s lips smirk under his finger. Riku can’t contain his own smile at the thought.

  
“Yeah. I suppose that’s true…” he trails off.

  
“Listen.” Riku remembers Sora telling his mother the same thing just a little earlier in the evening. “Relationships, even friendships, are always a risk. There’s no guarantee that we will still be best friends a year from now even if we don’t do this. I can gain a hero complex and go off to save the world, or you could end up being an arrogant ass hole who I don’t want to be around.” Riku punches his shoulder lightly. “Yeah, like that,” Sora says, smile spreading under Riku’s hand. “I want to try, to have this with you. Having you nearly die on me kinda proved that.” He shrugs. “But you gotta want to do it too.”

  
Riku sighs. He really doesn’t have to think too hard about whether or not he wants to. He can feel the glowy gold feeling stretching and pressing in his chest trying to force the yes out. In the end the decision is not hard.

  
“Alright. Fine. You win.”

  
He drags a thumb gently along Sora’s lower lip. The second kiss is a little lop-sided, catching the left edge of Sora’s mouth more than the center.

  
When they draw back he doesn’t need any tactile input to tell him that Sora’s grinning.

The next morning, Riku wakes with a start. He opens his eyes and feels the initial jolt when nothing is visible. He wonders how long it will take this side effect to go away. The vertigo has almost entirely disappeared, though sometimes he still feels like the ground tilts under his feet.

  
He sighs and sits up fumbling on his night stand for the new alarm clock that will announce the time when the correct button is pushed.

  
“Five. Forty. Five.” The clock announces in its robo voice.

  
“Huh? R’ku?” There is a sleepy mumble from the floor next to the bed.

  
Sora. Sora talking to his mom. Sora helping him get his room into the sort of order that he is going to need. Sora kissing him in the back garden.

  
Riku sits bolt upright in bed. He’s fairly certain that that had not been a dream. He remembers getting up from the grass eventually, Sora’s hand steady on his arm guiding him back inside. He remembers his parents watching TV, neither of them objecting when Sora asks if he can spend the night. He’s spent more nights here over the years than Riku can count.

  
“Riku?” The mattress dips and Sora’s hand rests against is shoulder. “You ok?”  
Riku reaches out finding the edge of Sora’s ear purely by accident and grounding himself against it. Then he nods.

  
“Yeah. Yeah, sorry waking up’s just a little hard right now.” Sora makes a sound in the back of his throat. Riku’s not sure what it means.

  
“Is there anything I can do?” Sora sounds lost. Riku’s heard the tone before, it means that he’s unsure of what to do next and hating it.

  
“Not really. I just need to get my bearings.” Sora nods, head moving against Riku’s hand.  
There is silence but for the occasional chirp of a lone cicada outside the open window. Sora’s cheek is warm against his palm. He doesn’t know when his finger tip starts tracing along the edge of Sora’s ear, but the quiet, choked sigh that breaks the silence is another slight jolt.

  
“Sorry.” He mutters feeling the warmth flutter like insect wings in the pit of his stomach.

  
“Don’t be.” He can hear Sora’s smile. Not quit the million watt grin from earlier, but something softer and sleepier.

  
“Sorry I woke you up then.” He says smiling in response. Sora brings a hand to rest against Riku’s cheek.

  
“Nah, don’t worry about it.” Sora smirks. Riku feels the change in expression under his hand and knows that that particular shift is one that he is going to feel a lot of in the coming weeks.

  
“It means you have to make it up to me later,” Sora announces. Riku groans.

  
“Oh, come on! I thought you grew out of chocolate chip pancakes years ago!” Sora laughs and wraps his arms around Riku’s back and presses his forehead to Riku’s shoulder, shaking gently.

  
“One never grows out of chocolate chip pancakes,” he declares solemnly after he regains some of his composure. Riku can still feel a few suppressed chuckles shaking through him.  
Riku snickers. Chocolate chip pancakes had been the standard punishment for him waking earlier than Sora at sleep overs for years.

  
Sora claims that they are the only way that he makes it through the day without the extra hours of sleep. Riku claims that they are diabetes waiting to happen and that Sora will be fat by the time he’s 25.

  
His hand had slipped to the back of Sora’s neck when the other boy had hugged him. He now slides up to find Sora’s cheek again, using the new position to draw Sora into a kiss.

  
Being able to kiss someone just because you can, Riku decides, is intoxicating.

  
When they tumble down the stairs later that morning, arguing over exactly how they’re going to spend the rest of summer break, Riku’s father is already making the chocolate chip pancakes. It seems that something’s never change Riku thinks again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My deepest thanks go to my editors, who are the only reason that this is even a bit readable. You are both awesome!


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